Martin Buber's Creative Manifesto

Abstract This article addresses a creative practice and philosophical line of enquiry that marked the culmination of Martin Buber's first period and was honoured as part of his commitment to community-building thereafter. The article will historicise this period of Buber's intellectual life, it will focus on his iconoclastic statements and gestures that were influenced by normative continental modernisms yet rooted in Jewish tradition, as well as his personal aesthetics, and will place Daniel (1913) at the heart of Buber's early creative emancipatory method. More importantly, it will seek to reframe a Buberian proposition that was abandoned because of the strictures and demands of the academic mannerisms of his time, but cannot be so easily dismissed in our own. It is an invitation for new work on Buber's own creative manifesto, here presented as the history of a practice that was set aside during Buber's academic ‘professionalisation’.